Informatica Streamlines APAC Activities in the Midst of Growing Cloud Business

According to Tony Frey, vice-president and general manager for Asia-Pacific and Japan, the tech provider agreed to concentrate its staff and operations around the country in the main markets of Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Tokyo in 2020.

Frey described the move, which went into effect in the third quarter of last year, as a significant change that would enable Informatica to scale to the next level. “As a company, we are not as big as Microsoft, and scaling and continuing to place Informatica staff in markets like Thailand and Vietnam was simply not the right model,” he said.

In emerging markets where Informatica no longer has direct operations, such as the Philippines and Indonesia, Frey said the company will focus on local distributors and partners such as Deloitte and Accenture to meet market demand. According to the company's latest growth and revenue forecasts, the current go-to-market approach seems to be successful.

“In the market, our company has grown year after year for two or three years in a row,” Frey said. “Specifically, we increased our cloud business's annual recurring sales by more than 40% from 2019 to 2020, and we foresee a 40% increase in 2021 from 2020.”

Over 2,000 Asia-Pacific customers depend on the company's data management platform for data integration, data quality, data governance, and master data management, among other things. Data integration and data accuracy are often cited as the top two issues that companies face when it comes to data management.

Informatica has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a provider of on-premise extract, transform, and load (ETL) solutions for moving data from its source to a data storage system, usually a data warehouse. It is now concentrating on providing cloud-based applications as more businesses use public cloud services to store and process data.

Rebuilt software

According to Frey, Informatica has spent the last few years not only porting but also rebuilding its software into cloud-native services that run on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud through collaborations with hyperscale cloud providers.

In a region where cloud adoption differs across countries, Frey identified Australia as a key market with the most avid users of cloud-based data management software, followed by Singapore.

For those that are falling behind, Frey says that while there is pressure on businesses to move to the cloud, it will not happen overnight.

“We have to be ready to set up our business so that we can catch the client when they're ready,” he said. “We should encourage them and show them a road to victory.”

For example, Frey believes that companies will find it easier to navigate the complexities of managing data in the cloud due to Informatica's new Intelligent Data Management Cloud platform, which supports data management processes ranging from data ingestion to lifting and moving data.

“It's a big part of what we're doing in many markets to educate customers predictably and seamlessly about how to launch that process,” he said.

Meanwhile, companies who wish to continue using on-premise software will do so through a software maintenance program for current Informatica clients, who can continue to get coverage for their investments, according to Frey, who added that new products will only be available through the cloud.

Frey acknowledged the rivalry in the data management landscape, which includes players ranging from storage suppliers to backup and recovery software vendors, but said that Informatica separates itself by its track record and laser focus on data management.

“We've been working in this area for 25 years straight, and we've only worked in this area,” he said. “So, whether it's ingestion, data integration, or master data management, all we do is 100% perfect core to data management.

“We're not a storage company, we're not a data warehouse, and we're sticking to the principles we've always followed: how can you make the most of data until it gets to where it wants to go?

“We create integration across various data silos that exist in companies,” said Frey. “We will continue to work in a hybrid world where a lot of systems will stay on-premise and some will go to the cloud as it makes sense.”